Ziko, you raise the subject of "illiterates"... I feel that it is blatant
discrimination to assert that the only way illiterates can create sources
worthy of citation on Wikipedia is either by becoming literate, or by being
interviewed by a literate person. This to me indicates a value judgement,
that literate people are inherently "worth more" than illiterate people.
2012/2/25 Ziko van Dijk <vandijk(a)wmnederland.nl>
Yes Ting, and for these cases there is the method of
[[oral history]].
This is a means to create what the Anglosaxons call "primary sources".
It is recorded and can later be used by a scholar (historian,
ethnologist etc.) for his research, for his "secondary sources".
These, with their scholar reflections, can be used by an encyclopedia.
There are good reasons for this way. One is, that it is not very
practical to cite from audiotapes/audiofiles. Another, that what this
individual is describing may be true for his personal environment but
cannot be generalized to others. For that, one needs the scholar.
Remember: witnesses are the most unreliable source ever. People tell
you plain nonsense - not because they want to ly or are stupid but
because the human brain is simply not created to be a historian. It
has the greatest difficulties to store information truthfully. So you
need to record, and compare the different assertions from different
people.
It is a possibility to record oral and visual expressions from
illiterates, and only later to do something with it scholarly. But all
this has nothing to do with Wikipedia.
Kind regards
Ziko
2012/2/25 Ting Chen <wing.philopp(a)gmx.de>de>:
Mountain, the first ever editor on zh-wp, and
still active until today,
told
me the following story one day (it was before the
Oral Citation project
but
I remembered the story very well):
He came from the coast of Shandong, and his father told him that earlier
there was a local tradition where people went early morning to the coast
to
catch crabs or mollusks (one of them). They used
to use a special
technique
to catch the animals. But meanwhile no one is
using this technique
anymore,
not only because there are now plenty of crabs or
mollusks on the market
from the hydroculture, but also because the coast which was wild earlier
are
now all urbanized, with oil terminals and harbors
and those. When
Mountain
told me that story he felt he would like to write
down those stories
because
in maybe 10 or 20 years, latest in 50 years, no
one would ever know that
there was such a thing on the world. And that tradition would be lost for
ever. But he also felt he could not write them on Wikipedia because he
had
no resources, because until now no of the
ethmologists ever had
interested
on such traditions and no academic resources ever
mentioned it. With the
Oral Citations Sourcing it would be possible to interview the old people
or
even let them show how the techniques worked.
Greetings
Ting
On 25.02.2012 09:02, wrote Lodewijk:
> Hi Castelo,
>
> just to make the discussion clearer: could you just give say 5 or 10
> examples of topics where you believe oral citations are unavoidable?
Then
I
hope that Ziko in his turn can explain how we can write about those
examples without using them.
Best regards,
Lodewijk
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dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter
http://wmnederland.nl/
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